30/10/2015

Please scroll down for the statement in Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and German

On December of 2009, and with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture as part of "Beirut Book Capital of the World", Samandal put out its 7th anthology in collaboration with the Belgian publishing house, L’employé du Moi, with further support from the French Cultural Center (CCF) in Beirut and the Belgian Ministry of Culture in Brussels. This publication was the fruit of a year-long collaboration between comic artists in Lebanon and their partners in Belgium, spanning several lectures and workshops, and launched at an exhibition at the CCF with the help of the UNESCO fund.

Four months later, three of the four Samandal editors that worked on that book were charged by the public attorney with a) inciting sectarian strife b) denigrating religion c) publishing false news and d) defamation and slander.

After five years of legal proceedings, we were found guilty on the basis of article 25 of the publications law, and on April 28, 2015 we were fined 10,000,000 LL each ($20,000 in total), equal to two years and nine months in jail on failure of payment. This incrimination, instigated by religious institutions and sustained by the state, has crippled Samandal and threatens to bring our decade-long career in comics to an end.

We began Samandal as a volunteer-based, non-profit organization in 2007 because we felt that comics were an underrepresented medium in our part of the world. We wanted to create a platform to tell stories from Lebanon and the Middle East, as well as to bring independent comics from around the world to a local audience. Alongside publishing comics, we also organized countless workshops, comics jams, international artist exchanges, and lectures, opening up the dialogue to include artists from different disciplines, and along with Metropolis Art Cinema have co-founded Beirut Animated, the biennial animation festival in Beirut.

It thus came as a surprise when we found out that the state had charged us with inciting sectarian strife. Our case began with a letter sent by the minister of information to the minister of justice requesting litigation against Samandal on account of “Christian personalities” finding two panels in two separate comics offensive to religion. The minister of justice in turn referred the case to the public prosecutor at the court of cassation.

The comics themselves address religion only tangentially and deal satirically with completely different subjects. However, a handful of panels were selectively taken out of context as proof of blasphemy (akin to indicting a publisher for having a character in a book use the name of the lord in vain.) We want to present these comics to you in their entirety ("Lebanese Recipes for Revenge" by Lena Merhej & "Ecce Homo" by Valfret) so that you may judge their disruptive natures for yourselves, however we cannot link to them directly for fear of a recurrence of the whole legal debacle. Instead we direct you to our co-publisher’s website grandpapier.com

Despite our lawyers’ airtight legal defense against these claims, the court fell back on the vagaries of an elastic censorship law and a cohort of complacent public servants to criminalize and punish us, in the process committing several legal violations to wit:

1- The three editors currently have "warrants of subjugation" (مذكرات اخضاع) issued against them. These illegal warrants, issued by General Security (despite being annulled by the decision of the council of ministers no. 10 dated 24/7/2014), give it the power to delay official transactions, hold passports, and harass subjects at will. Warrants of subjugation are regularly issued against human rights activists, lawyers and authors/artists as a method of intimidation.

2- The publication law in Lebanon places the legal responsibility for such cases primarily on the authors of the offending story, in this case, Ms. Merhej (also one of the editors of Samandal) and Valfret, and then on the publisher, Samandal Association in this case. Instead, the legal proceedings ignored these laws and targeted three of the four editors personally, incurring triple the charges and triple the fines.

3- The editors were never allowed to testify at the cassation court, even after repeated official requests were made. The same court rejected our request to summon the authors as witnesses.

The assumption that we built a platform such as Samandal to take cheap shots at religious institutions is absurd, and the richness of our publications speaks for themselves. We respect all religions equally and have no interest in targeting any single one for ridicule. However, we have no respect, and in fact much contempt, for those who use religion as a way of exercising their power and tightly policing public discourse.

The assertion that Samandal is insulting the Christian faith is an attempt to pit Samandal against Christianity and religion as a whole, when in fact it is a few individuals in power who are purposefully misreading the work in order to monopolize the conversation and deflect from their own incompetence at state legislation and their own incitement of sectarian strife when it suits them to do so. It is an unfortunate irony that a non-profit publishing platform for comics was prosecuted for “crimes” that continue to be committed daily by various politicians and their respective news outlets. Religion has been wrested from the hands of worshippers and into the chokehold of state institutions, stifling conversation and reducing all debate to a reductive binary of “with us or against us.” We refuse to be a part of that exchange. In fact, Samandal was created precisely to provide an alternative space for a different kind of dialogue, one much richer in language and nuanced in its discussions of the subtleties of the world around us.

Far from being an isolated incident, the Samandal case is simply one iteration within a longstanding practice of arbitrary and unjust state censorship and silencing of artistic production. There is a pressing need to strike a balance between the dangers of censorship on artistic freedom to that of the rights of the plaintiff and other religious sensitivities. This balance becomes even more imperative when the defendant is an artist, while the plaintiff is the public prosecution, or a powerful economic or religious figure, who stands to lose little or nothing in return.

Today Samandal is threatened with imminent collapse because of the capricious and biased application of an antiquated censorship law. The upcoming release of “Geographia” will be the final issue we can publish as Samandal’s finances have been crippled by the damages of the lawsuit forcing our organization to shut down.

However, our love of comics and our ambitions to publish more have not been dampened by this incident and we hope to protest this ruling by continuing to publish, improve and expand Samandal with your continued solidarity. Samandal has survived and thrived because of the involvement and support of its public, and we now call on you to help us relaunch the publication. We hope that a crowdfunding campaign will help us get back on our feet and furthermore publish two new anthologies of Samandal comics. If you would like to help us in our push back, please donate at our online crowdfunding campaign here.

09/11/2015

30/10/2015

Samandal is a volunteer-based non-profit organization that has been publishing comics anthologies from Lebanon and the rest of the world since 2007. In 2009 three of the four editors were charged by the Lebanese state with inciting sectarian strife, denigrating religion, publishing false news, and slander on account of “Christian personalities” taking offense to two panels from different comics in our 7th issue, titled “Revenge”. The panels were taken out of context and misinterpreted through a narrow sectarian reading, yet after five years of litigation we lost our case and the following appeal, forcing us to pay 30 million Lebanese liras in damages. The Samandal NGO has buckled under the weight of these fines and our latest issue, “Geographia”, looks to be our last. We are launching a crowdfunding campaign in a last ditch effort to help Samandal fight this unjust ruling and continue publishing comics.

09/11/2015

5/11/2015

05/11/2015

In The Guardian today: "A Lebanese satirical comic last week threw what may prove to be either its final launch party – or the first of its resurrection. The event markedSamandal magazine’s attempt to crowdfund its way out of oblivion after three of its editors were convicted of crimes against religion and fined for their work, nearly putting the experimental comics collective out of business..." by Marcia Lynx Qualey

3/11/2015

Samandal is the Arabic word for salamander. Much like the dual habitats of amphibious creatures, Samandal comics thrive between two worlds; the image and the word, entertainment and substance, the low brow and the raised brow, the experimental and the traditional.

Samandal is a volunteer-based non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of the art of comics in Lebanon and the rest of the world. Based in Beirut, we have published 15 magazines, and two comics anthologies and hosted comics-related events since 2007.

30/8/2015

Under the banner “Picture stories from here and there,” the Beirut collective Samandal publishes local and international comix. For the uninitiated, comix imply countercultural, illustrated tales for adult audiences. Personal, quirky, and rebellious, comix have no boundaries. The underground art spans from word-heavy narratives in ink to wordless sequential illustrations, reminiscent of 19th century woodcuts (think graphic poems), and everything in between; artists borrow techniques from caped crusaders, cinema, literature, and more.

4/11/2015

On December of 2009, and with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture as part of "Beirut Book Capital of the World", Samandal put out its 7th anthology in collaboration with the Belgian publishing house, L’employé du Moi, with further support from the French Cultural Center (CCF) in Beirut and the Belgian Ministry of Culture in Brussels. This publication was the fruit of a year-long collaboration between comic artists in Lebanon and their partners in Belgium, spanning several lectures and workshops, and launched at an exhibition at the CCF with the help of the UNESCO fund.

26/09/2015

In the spring of 2010, three Lebanese comic-book artists were ordered to come to the Beirut headquarters of the Directorate of General Security, where the country’s censorship authorities are located. Omar Khouri, Hatem Imam, and Fadi (the Fdz) Baki were in their early thirties, and had known one another since they were kids. (I’ve known Khouri and Baki since then as well.) In 2007, they founded Samandal, a trilingual comic magazine based in Beirut, which became an important platform for Middle Eastern comic artists. “When we were first called in, we had no idea what was going on,” Khouri said. “We assumed...

18/12/2015

Since it was founded in 2007, Samandal has been one of the most dynamic and interesting comics anthologies in the world. The Beirut-based anthology has been at the forefront of a shifting culture of comics throughout the Middle East, spawning many publications in its wake. In recent years a new and vibrant comic culture has emerged throughout the Middle East and Samandal has been at the forefront of this, publishing great work by cartoonists from around the world in three languages (English, French and Arabic).

19/12/2015

An unnecessary fight with religious censors has pushed a co-operative Lebanese comic book to the brink. It’s another frustrating episode for comic book fans across the region who are starved of local titles while US comic books dominate the shelves.

Samandal, a non-profit publisher run by volunteers, is in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign to raise $US 60,000 for future issues after three of its editors were found guilty of denigrating Christianity.